Ginga

“Sometimes freedom has to disguise itself as beauty in order to survive.

Two Capoeira practitioners are mid-ginga. What looks, to the untrained eye, like a dance is actually a martial art — born among enslaved people who needed to train to defend themselves while appearing, to their captors, to be doing something harmless.

We are all, in small ways, carriers of this instinct. We have all learned, at some point, to hide the true version of ourselves inside a socially acceptable version of ourselves. Sometimes for good reason. Sometimes long past the time we needed to.

This image isn’t only about resistance.

It’s about the ways you have hidden your own truth in order to survive.

What in you has been disguised for so long that it has almost forgotten it is a disguise — and is it safe now to set it down?”